January 8th, 2006
Computers that feel our mood
It certainly happened to you to be so frustrated by the ‘reactions’ of your computer that you wanted to break it. And the computer industry has noticed, trying to build hardware and software as user-friendly as possible. Still, it would be a good idea for your computer to guess when you’re about to become mad at it. Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute in Germany are working on computers that estimate our emotions. Their solution involves cameras and image analysis, but also special gloves equipped with sensors to record your heartbeat and breathing rate, your blood pressure or your skin temperature. And even if it’s difficult to train a computer to interpret emotions, they have enough confidence in their system to demonstrate it at the next CeBIT in March 2006.
Here is a short introduction to this serious problem.
Several recent studies have found that computer users not only love and cherish their machines, but very often maltreat them. Experts have identified aggression towards the PC as a genuine problem that deserves greater attention in the academic field. The kicks and blows of frustrated users cause computer damage that cannot be dismissed as negligible, neither in terms of personal property nor on a commercial and economic level. If only for this reason, it would be good for computers to assess their users’ emotions correctly and respond accordingly.
This problem is about to be solved by Christian Peter, engineer at the department for Human-Centered Interaction Technologies in Rostock, who’s working on the Emotions in Speech project.
How can the computer possibly find out anything about its human operator’s frame of mind? Emotions are given away by peripheral physiological processes. Some of these, such as posture, fidgeting or frowning, are easy to detect and can be observed and classified by a camera with image analysis software. Heartbeat and breathing rate, blood pressure, skin temperature and electrical resistance of the skin, on the other hand, are rather more subtle factors.
"We have developed a glove that has sensors for measuring parameters like these," says Christian Peter. "It is connected to a device that evaluates and saves the data. We are also working on techniques that will enable computers to interpret facial expressions and extract emotional elements from voice signals."
Below is a picture of Peter smiling at its computer and using a glove equipped with sensors transmitting several of his physiological parameters (Credit: Fraunhofer IGD). Here is a link to a larger version.
For more information, Christian Peter recently presented a paper during a workshop about the role of emotion in human-computer interaction held in September 2005. Here is a link to his presentation named "Emotion Models and their Implications for System Design" (PDF format, 6 pages, 89 KB).
If you happen to try this system during CeBIT 2006, which will be held on March 9-15, 2006, in Hanover, please let me know what happened.
Sources: Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, Research News, Issue 12, Topic 6, December 2005; and various web sites
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